The Bridge That Divides Italy
Zoom into a map of Italy and you will notice a gap where the tip of the toe of the boot-shaped peninsula seems to touch Sicily—the stretch of sea that makes Sicily an island. The Strait of Messina is just a couple of miles wide at its narrowest point, and between two coasts that never quite meet, the Mediterranean produces a distinct hallucination. Every so often, sailors see it: the fata morgana, a trick of light that makes the shoreline seem closer. The sorceress Morgan le Fay, in a Sicilian telling of the Arthurian legend, lured a barbarian king to his death in these waters, smiling as he drowned.
In the south of Italy, distances deceive. The train between Palermo and Bari travels roughly the same space as between Turin and Rome in triple the time. A Ministry of Infrastructure study concluded that Sicily might as well be a hundred times farther from the mainland than it actually is, for all the time required to cross the strait by car on a rusty ferry. Of all the islands without a bridge or tunnel connecting them to Europe, Sicily is the biggest and—in geographical terms only—the nearest.
Build a bridge, then, and have it over with! The ranks of men who pursued this idea include the emperor Charlemagne, the Bourbon king of what was once called “the Two Sicilies,” the later king who unified Italy, the infrastructure-loving fascist Benito Mussolini, and the long-serving Silvio Berlusconi. All failed.
[From the December 1863 issue: Something about bridges]
The bridge along the Messina Strait is “Italy’s Apollo project,” Francesco Costa, a Sicilian podcaster, told me. The state has spent more than 1 billion euros on studies, models, stipends, torts—everything but construction.
Matteo Salvini, Giorgia Meloni’s infrastructure minister, says he will build it. His predecessor Paola De Micheli told me that his odds might be the best ever: All layers of government support the project, the funds are, serve as “a model for the Italy that believes in itself.”
